^Yeah, but next ep is going to be a little funny. I wonder if Aaron will ironically end up in Ben's hands when Sun tries to shoot Ben and fails (since all of them are under island protection). Hopefully we'll get a solid explanation on why Ben wants Aaron, especially considering the warning of not letting him get raised by another.

I'm glad we finally switched gears with the Rousseau group because I was getting sick of Daniel's story.

It also seems that Miles may have been the Chang's child considering he got a nosebleed too. I think the pattern of the nosebleeds might be that the people who have stayed on the Island the longest will be most susceptible to them. Also, remembering back to Locke's dream with Horace, I'd think that both the island and everyone's consciousness are traversing time because Horace had a nosebleed in Locke's dream, so that means Horace was experiencing the sickness in the presence of a spectator's (Locke) in the dream, so maybe he got it because Horace consciously tried to intercept Locke using time travel.

Edit: Few other things I noticed while zoning out in class- the inclusion of finding Vincent's unbroken leash was suspicious (especially since he would fit the bill for the description Darlton gave for Jacob as being someone we've seen but have never heard talk).

The other thing I realized was after Sawyer saw Kate's delivery of Aaron. Everyone on the island has been traveling to different points in time on the islands, but not within their own lives. This is a subtle but important contrast, considering that the latter is what happened to Desmond. Desmond's consciousness split between events from his past and the present, but clearly that's not the case here. So this is a little more support for the idea that the island is traveling in time.

* Damon Lindelof confirmed in the February 4, 2009 episode of the Official Lost Podcast that Vincent will survive through the end of Season 6, making Vincent the first and so far only character that has been confirmed will survive the entirety of the series.

Originally Posted by etufo

Pretty good episode. I hope we get to learn more about the temple that contains the smoke monster(s). It's been 4 seasons and we still hardly know anything about these creatures.

Actually, there's quite a bit we know of the Smoke monster that hasn't been directly mentioned in the show, but has been demonstrated in the show through indirect means. A damn good analysis of it that I saw recently is this vid. If you don't want to sit through 30 minutes of this guy's analysis and his bird's chirping, here's cliffsnotes:

-The Dharma Initiative called the monster Cerberus, and labeled the holes the monster comes out of/retreats to Cerberus Vents (CV) on the blast door map.
-The Smoke monster can separate/join from three separate bodies of less black smoke that come together
-The smoke monster has made 3 types of noises- one like a chain being reeled in, one that frankly sounds like Jurassic park, and one that sounds like sparking. The chain reeling sound has come when it drags people, jurassic comes right before an attack, and sparking comes when the monster is really close to people and makes electric flashes at them as if it were shooting a camera.
-The smoke monster seems to be unable to get through trees, can't appear in the rain, and DHARMA's sonic fence.
-The smoke monster can materialize into people, possess dead bodies, travel off the island, and is associated with Jacob's cabin.

Anyways, this episode was epic, probably the best of the season so far. Mindblowing amounts of revelations. We learned more about Smokey, more on the temple, the conditions that led to Locke leaving the island with broken legs, the erratic and hastening hemorrhagic time jumps caused by an apparently misangled wheel, that Ben is still playing chess using the losties as pieces and Jacob is pissed about it, that Christian can't help John stand up, and that Hawking is indeed Faraday's mother (who might be 'Ellie' from the island too). And, of course "This place is death". Only way this could have gotten better is if we got some more Richard.

One recurring joke in this ep that might be more than a joke is about the submarine. Both Montand and Sawyer mocklingly muse that the sub is still around and John gives his characteristic weird smile of knowing something that his company doesn't after Sawyer says it. The sub explosion has been one of those topics Lost fans have been debating forever, and there's a large group of people (including me) who believe that John just moved the sub away from the dock and made it go under the water before exploding the dock. The significance of this is emphasized especially because of Damon Lindleoff's (co-producer of LOST) response to this theory:

Originally Posted by http://lostpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Submarine#Producer.27s_commentary

When Locke was walking away from the submarine in "The Man from Tallahassee", he appeared to be soaking wet, despite the fact that we never saw him get into the water. This was just before the blow-up. Are we supposed to be wondering why John Locke was all wet? Damon Lindelof says: No comment.

I agree, but I think that has more to do with poor presentation than anticlimactic plot. I'd read a thread a while back (like in Decemeber) where the creator had predicted that the off-island losties would get back on the island through a replicated plane crash on Ajira Airways, but he thought they would only get back in the last episode of the season. Frankly, his version was better than the actual.
Also, though the writers were trying to make mysteries for us to be elaborated on later by not explaining how all the reluctant losties decided to come back, it is really lame since we already can guess how it happened- messengers from the island.

Things that made this episode lame:
-getting back to the island so quickly
-Ben's unelaborated visit to a friend' that resulted in him bloodied up
-Kate's unelaborated loss of Aaron and decision to come to the island (maybe it has to do with Ben? Or maybe Claire?)
-Hurley's unelaborated decision to come back to the island (the guitar is a nice clue about Charlie though)
-Sayid's unelaborated decision to come back to the island
-Not getting to hear Locke's actual suicide message
-Jack throwing a temper tantrum at Locke's corpse
-Ethan's cocked gun pose being spammed. Now we've seen both Sawyer and Jin use the pose, even though they should have recognized their target(s) before putting up the gun.

Points of interest for the ep:
-The one non-lostie on board the Ajira flight with them. I'm convinced he also came aboard to get back to the island (makes me think of Paulo for some reason or the supposed new character Caeser).
-Desmond's decision on the island.
-Eloise explaining how DHARMA found the island. The equation they were working on was clearly the Valenzetti eqn and the person who developed the island locator fits the profile of Pierre Chang well.
Edit: I just remembered that Sayid was accompanied by someone else onto the plane too. So I wonder the same stuff about her as the other random non-Lostie so far.

By the way, next episode is titled "Lafleur" and is a Sawyer-centric episode.

^Ben's murdering can be interpreted so many ways, but my gut feeling is that he was waiting for John to leak some information to him before letting him proceed with his death (as opposed to killing Locke as a prerog from the island). Surprising to know that Ben had such little info. I suspected that Ben had killed Locke last ep when he revealed meeting him, but wasn't sure in light of the nice guy act. When Widmore mentioned Ben's prior attempts at the killing though, I was sure that's how Locke would die. Pretty much the entirety of the episode was boring and predictable aside from the beginning (which was nice since it confirmed that those 2 other flight members are the new cast as I thought they were last time).